1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a gesture detecting method and apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
If human gestures can be automatically recognized, it will be possible to broadly utilize gesture recognition in various fields. Such recognition is applicable to fields such as a household electric appliance which is remotely operated without depending on a remote controller, a user interface of a console terminal, an input interface replacing a keyboard or a mouse, recognition of sign language, an input interface of a game apparatus, and apparatus operation support for a driver.
In a conventional gesture detecting method described in Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 6-12493 (see page 13, FIG. 1), a standard pattern of a gesture to be detected is prepared and stored beforehand, and the stored standard pattern is matched with that of the input gesture to detect the gesture.
A database of the standard pattern has to be prepared, for example, for each user with respect to any gesture to be detected in order to detect the gesture with good precision. Therefore, there has been a problem that great effort is required for the preparation of the standard pattern.
Moreover, even as to the same gesture, if the velocity of a motion is high, pattern matching has to be performed between the standard pattern and the input gesture in consideration of time contraction. Therefore, there has also been a problem that the pattern matching requires a large calculation amount.
Furthermore, there has been a problem that mismatch occurs between the standard pattern and the input gesture by the influence of unexpected noise superimposed upon moving picture data, and erroneous detection of the gesture occurs, even when the standard pattern is prepared with great effort in a case where the motion of a moving specific part is calculated from photographed moving picture data to detect the gesture based on the calculation.
In Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2000-163196 (see page 10, FIG. 6), a gesture detecting method is described in which no standard pattern is used. In this method, a moving person is regarded as an object, a vertical moving amount of a head is detected, the moving amount is compared with a predetermined threshold value, and it is detected that a nod has been performed in a case where the moving amount exceeds the threshold value.
In this method, even in a case where the object person's head moves as if a V-shaped track were drawn (this cannot be said to be a nod), when the moving amount exceeds a predetermined value in the head's vertical motion, this motion is detected as a nod.
The present invention has been developed in order to solve the above-described problem, and an object is to provide a gesture detecting method and apparatus capable of detecting a gesture from the relationship between velocity vectors of a specific part of an object to robustly detect the gesture with speed and precision.